The world media captured the 1989 protests and crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. But across China, similar protests were taking place. Students in the southwest city of Chengdu began their own hunger strike in Tianfu Square several days after their Beijing counterparts. The photographer of this image — and several below — asked not to be identified because of current ties with China.

Chengdu resident Tang Deying, who is now in her 70s, has spent the past 25 years seeking answers about her son's disappearance. The 17-year-old was beaten to death in police custody in June 1989; police later gave her a photograph showing his battered corpse.

Those injured in the clashes wait to receive treatment. The prevalence of head wounds is indicative of the police strategy of beating protesters around the head. The injured begged the Western photographer to "tell the world!"

On June 4, a badly injured man is carried into a Chengdu hospital. Witnesses described scenes of police brutality, where people were beaten unconscious simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Courtesy of Kim Nygaard

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Originally published on May 30, 2014 5:38 pm

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR's longtime China correspondent, says the country's government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim's forthcoming book, The People's Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying.

Tang Deying holds her determination in the stubborn set of her jaw. This diminutive, disheveled, elderly woman shuffling into the room in her pink plastic flip-flops is one of the few living links to the crackdown in Chengdu during the summer of 1989.

When martial law troops opened fire on civilians in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the violence was beamed immediately into living rooms around the world. Yet it has taken a quarter-century for details to emerge of the deadly events in Chengdu that cost Tang's 17-year-old son his life.

For 25 years, a single aim has driven Tang's existence: seeking restitution and accountability for the death of her son, Zhou Guocong, who was fatally beaten in police custody after disappearing in the 1989 Chengdu crackdown.

"Right is right. Wrong is wrong," she told me firmly.

That simple mantra became the starting point for me to pursue a trail of evidence sprawling over three continents, including eyewitness accounts, old photographs, hastily scribbled, anguished journal entries, U.S. diplomatic cables and the Chinese government records laying out the official version of events. These disparate threads entwine to illustrate Chengdu's forgotten tragedy, which has been almost entirely wiped from the collective memory.

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu's Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a "Little Tiananmen." The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the "June 4th massacre" and mourning wreaths with the message: "We Are Not Afraid To Die."

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: "Tell the world! Tell the world!"

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters' heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government's official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

More than a dozen Western guests initially took shelter in the quarters of the U.S. consul general. But in the early hours of the morning while returning to her room, Nygaard saw what looked like sandbags piled in the courtyard. As she wondered what they would be used for, she spotted a flicker of movement and realized with a chill of horror that the sandbags were actually people lying face-down on the ground, their hands secured behind their backs.

"I remember so well, because I was thinking, 'Oh my God, they're breaking their arms when they're doing that,' " she told me.

Eventually, two trucks pulled up. Nygaard remembers that moment vividly: "They piled bodies into the truck, and we were, like, 'There's no way you could survive that.' Certainly the people on the bottom would have suffocated. They picked them up like sandbags, and they threw them into the back of the truck. They threw them like garbage."

Five separate witnesses described the same scene, which was also mentioned in a U.S. diplomatic cable. The witnesses estimated they had seen 30 to 100 bodies thrown into the trucks.

The local government made no secret of the detentions. The Whole Story of the Chengdu Riots, a Chinese-language book recounting the official version of events, notes that "70 ruffians" had been caught at the Jinjiang hotel.

As to what happened to those detainees and how many — if any — of them died, it is impossible to know.

The Chengdu protests were immediately labeled "political turmoil" on a par with Beijing, with the protesters seen as "rioters," stigmatizing all who took part. This instant rewriting of history was the first step toward lowering a blanket of state-sponsored amnesia over the events of 1989.

Why does it even matter 25 years later? It matters because of Tang Deying, who has been punished for her refusal to forget. Her son, who was detained riding his bike home on June 6, never emerged from police custody. She was told by another detainee that he'd been beaten to death. On her quest for an explanation of his death, she has visited Beijing five times to lodge official complaints. Each time she was intercepted and sent back. She has been detained by police, beaten, placed under surveillance and twice locked in an iron cage.

But her stubbornness paid out hard-won dividends. In 2000, she was presented with a photograph of her son's corpse, which confirmed the painful knowledge of how he died. Blood was congealed around his nostrils and on one side of his mouth. There was a large bruise across his nose, and his face appeared swollen and uneven. One of his eyes was slightly open. On seeing it, she fainted. In death, her son was still watching her.

In 2006, she accepted a "hardship allowance" of almost $9,000, becoming the first and only person to be given a government payout in connection with a 1989 death. The authorities expected her to stop her activities — but she hasn't. She says those responsible still need to admit their culpability.

What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

Though China's citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying's experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Twenty-five years ago today, students and intellectuals went to Beijing's Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of a communist leader who was seen as a reformer. That gathering soon evolved into a mass pro-democracy protest.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Freedom, freedom. We need freedom. We need freedom. We don't need this military council. We are the people. We don't military council.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The protests grew larger and larger as tens of thousands moved into the square, until finally they were crushed by the Chinese army in early June. It's believed hundreds were killed. The international media captured the story of that massacre, but very little of the history that came up in this conversation with our colleague Steve Inskeep.

STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: This part of the story comes from Louisa Lim, NPR's longtime correspondent in Beijing. She says China's government has done all it can to erase the memory of the uprising, and she set about to reconstruct the events of 1989 in a forthcoming book called "The People's Republic of Amnesia." Her story includes an investigation of demonstrations and repression outside Beijing. This news was hardly covered even at the time. She went to the scene in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu. Today, Chengdu has a population of 14 million.

LOUISA LIM, BYLINE: The sites that were so important in 1989 still remain today. So, there's a statue of Chairman Mao, which is in the main square. And back then, that was where the students staged their hunger strike. Nowadays, you're much more likely to see BMWs and Audis just kind of zooming past the statue. So, the city itself has had a facelift. It looks very different from what it did back then.

INSKEEP: So, you tried to reconstruct what happened, and you write that at the beginning, these protests in the city of Chengdu, which is a city of many millions of people, were kind of small, kind of lame. What were they like, and what happened?

LIM: So, in Chengdu, there was a student movement, just like in Beijing, and it really mirrored that. Students occupied the square in Chengdu. They had their hunger strike. But what was different was that on June the 4th, after the protests in Beijing were put down by army troops, in Chengdu, people came out onto the streets, and they came out onto the streets in protest against the brutality in Beijing. Thousands of people marched to the square with signs saying things like we are not afraid of death. And there was then this inevitable crackdown. Even according to the Chinese government's own accounts, eight people were killed, including two students in Chengdu, and more than 1,800 people were injured there. And I spoke to an American who was teaching English in Chengdu at the time, Dennis Rea, and he described to me how he saw wounded people being ferried out of that square.

DENNIS REA: The members of the public had joined hands to create a safe passageway for people who were constantly carrying in wounded citizens. And we saw them come in, you know, on people's shoulders, draped over bicycles and carts. We were probably in that precise location for about 20 minutes. There was never a time when I don't recall somebody being carried in.

INSKEEP: Hearing this account of it, reading your reconstruction of it, I begin to get a sense of maybe tens of thousands of people on the streets or more at that point. How did the news of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square and Beijing - the story that we know about - affect the story in Chengdu as the days went on?

LIM: The people of Chengdu became evermore enraged by the behavior of the authorities, and the fact that people were being beaten. And they began to target government properties. So they burnt down state-owned markets, started setting fire to police cars. Then they targeted a very large, state-run hotel - the Jinjiang Hotel, which still exists - and that was the site of a second crackdown by the authorities, which was witnessed by quite a large number of foreigners who were saying in that hotel.

INSKEEP: And one of these people that you spoke with was a woman named Kim Nygaard. Who was she and what did she see?

LIM: So, Kim Nygaard is an American, and at the time she was based at one of the universities in Chengdu. She had been sheltering in the hotel at the U.S. consul-general's residence while there were these kind of battles outside, teargas in the streets. And then when she went back to her room afterwards, she was told it was safe. As she looked out of the window into the courtyard, she saw bodies on the ground. At first she thought they were sandbags, and then she saw movement, and she saw how a policeman was tying or wiring the arms of a prisoner together. And as she watched, she was convinced that they were breaking the arms of the protestors. And then she watched as two trucks pulled up.

KIM NYGAARD: They piled bodies into the truck. And we were, like, there's no way you could survive that. Certainly, people on the bottom would have suffocated. You know, they picked them up like sandbags, and they threw them into the back of the truck. They threw them, like garbage.

INSKEEP: Kim Nygaard, a witness, speaking there over Skype. And this is just one of the eyewitness accounts that you've gathered, Louisa Lim. There's another person who describes heads being bashed with iron rods. This was a pretty brutal crackdown in Chengdu.

LIM: It was a very brutal crackdown, and even today, it's difficult to know how many people were targeted. And when I went to Chengdu, the thing that really started me on this quest was meeting one woman, Tang Deying, who lost her son that day. He, she subsequently discovered, was beaten by police and she was actually given a photograph of his corpse which clearly showed that he had been beaten to death. But she, even someone like her, who's campaigned so very long to try and find out exactly what happened, she was unable to tell me whether there were other victims in this way that she knew about. I mean, when I asked her that question, she just looked me straight in the eye, and she said: Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. And I think, to me, that was a sign of just how taboo this topic is in China today.

INSKEEP: Why is it so important to the state to keep this story hidden in plain sight, as it were? Because people know that something terrible happened. Why are they so determined to put the lid on the details, if they can?

LIM: Well, people know overseas that something terrible happened in China in 1989. But in China itself, the collective memory is really being lost over time. And I think 25 years ago, I mean, China suppressed its people with bullets and clubs, but now it's using these much more sophisticated tools of control. It's really manipulating history in order to create a national identity and to try to build patriotism. So, I think that's why what happened then is still important today. It gives us a window into what preoccupies the Chinese government. After all, this is a government which really sees the threat within, rather from outside.

INSKEEP: Louisa Lim's new book is called "The People's Republic of Amnesia." She's a correspondent for NPR News, a longtime Beijing correspondent. Thanks very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.